Silicon Valley EcoTuesday chapter organized an interesting talk in July. Don Eagleston, the President and CEO of the Sunnyvale Chamber of commerce talked about `Authentic Urban Ecotourism’. Don is a leader in establishing Ecotourism plans in urban environments, a concept new to conventional Ecotourism. In this talk this month Don defined the criteria required for authentic ecotourism and how it differentiates itself from greenwashing and adventure tourism.

Bridget Biscotti Bradley proclaims that she loves just one thing – home improvement! She has done every types of remodeling in her home until she found green home. She is our speaker for the month of May. She is the co-founder and owner of RECLAIM Inc, a Menlo Park based seller of green remodeling products for homes. She writes in her website – “Our goal is to find products that you instantly fall in love with because of their style, comfort, and usability. The fact that they are also eco-friendly will be an added bonus.” They sell all kinds of green products such as recycled materials and organic materials. This talk should be very interesting.

Come and meet Bridget on Tuesday, May 25th, as she talks about her experiences and her ideas of creating green homes with stylish and yet eco-friendly products . You will also be able to interact with other EcoTuesday members and share your ideas of changing the world to a better place. This is a free event but registration is required! Please register at www.ecotuesday.com/events.

EcoTuesday event on Tuesday April 27th, 2010:

Speaker: Bridget Bradley, RECLAIM Inc, Menlo Park

Venue: Wild Palms Hotel, 910 East Fremont Avenue, Sunnyvale CA.

Thanks,

Rohini Batra and Anand Iyer

Ambassadors, Silicon Valley Chapter

EcoTuesday

The biggest surprise of the last month’s EcoTuesday was the speaker herself. Megan Fluke is a very unassuming person in real. You would think of her as a girl next door. But when she began talking about the things she believed in, the audience of about 15 was spell bound. Indeed, she has so much experience and total conviction in what she believes in. Sierra Club cannot have a better person in grassroots organizer than Megan. She talked about the communities of the future, which are climate friendly.

Climatepath’s mission could be summed up in one sentence – “make consumers aware of the real carbon economy and not limit them to the market economy”.

This is what Dave Rochlin, CEO of Climatepath, expounded during the last week’s EcoTuesday event. We are living in a capitalist society, where we believe price is always set by market forces, supply and demand. We also believe that the true cost of a product is already reflected in the price we pay. But contrary to the wisdom, market forces subsidize the product cost in many ways. What we pay may be just the production cost (fixed cost + variable cost + transportation cost). But, each product has its own lifecycle and many of the lifecycle costs are hidden from the consumer.

When we pay less for the products we use, we are actually pushing the problem to another part of the world or to the next generation. Therefore awareness needs to be created in the society regarding these costs. Dave demonstrated the lack of awareness by posing three simple questions to the audience:

(1) Do you use organic material because it is good for the environment? – Many hands went up.

(2) Do you use fair trade products and practices so that you are aware of how the product is produced? – Again many hands went up.

(3) Do you buy carbon offsets to reduce your carbon footprint? – None of the audience raised their hands. 

Dave mentioned simple steps to adopt conservation in everyday life:

Wash clothes in cold water – the detergents work great in cold water as well as hot water. Washing in cold water cuts the fuel consumption tremendously. Also drying them in sunlight really helps.

Transportation, esp. air transportation is the biggest user of fuel. Cutting down non-essential travel, limiting the air travel to few trips per year can really help with the fuel consumption.

Dave is big on technology help to solve the sustainability problem. He suggests usage of network computing, cloud, storage on network as possible solution to prevent people migration.

Overall, the talk was both entertaining and enchanting for an audience of nearly 12 people (26 registrants). Dave truly rocked!!

Anthony Tsai of Urban Solutions made a great point during last week’s talk – “Sustainability can actually save money”. His talk was refreshing for a small business. Small business by definition is barely able to make ends meet. In this tight economic entity, every penny saved is every penny earned. Urban Solutions as a non-profit organization, is helping such businesses save substantial dollars while promoting sustainability principles. Started as an organization to promote businesses in the low-income neighborhood of San Francisco’s sixth street, this organization has grown into helping businesses to become green and at the same time save money. For example, in one of the businesses, they went in and changed the old inefficient fluorescent lamps with efficient ones, saving 40% on their electricity bills. Anthony points out in this instance everybody benefits as PG&E can divert the savings to other areas where it is needed. 

Anthony was advocating for a complete sustainability framework, where one should not limit to just electricity and water to look for sustainable savings. The three main areas where savings are huge include: energy usage; water usage and garbage disposal. Energy and water are fairly well understood. Garbage is the least understood of the three. Anthony prescribed that every business should look into the amount of garbage generated more carefully. They should divert most of the garbage generated into recycling bins. The more they shrink the size of the regular garbage bins, better it is for the environment.

Overall, the talk was quite enlightening to most of the attendees. His experience in analyzing the rainforest in Borneo for carbon credits was unique. The greatest learning from the talk and the experience of Anthony was that it does not take much to be on the path of sustainability. Sustainability begins with everyone looking at their own lifestyle to realize the savings.